All posts in Media

The new American Bee Journal is out and we are proud to be featured, in a beautiful article by Alison McAfee, Ph.D. Student in the Leonard Foster Lab at the University of British Columbia, who we met through the Master Beekeepers Course there in 2015. We can hardly wait for our copy to arrive in the mail! Thank you Alison for listening with such care and writing with such power:

Alison McAfee. (2017). Hives for Humanity: Using bees to create social change in the Downtown Eastside. American bee journal. 157(9). In press.

Thank you to everyone who submitted applications, this job posting is now closed and we are no longer accepting applications.

We are looking for a part-time Office Manager (with opportunity to become full-time) to help keep us organized and to implement systems for us as we grow. You’ll be working closely with the core organizational team (that’s us!) in a fun, hard-working, community focused organization. You don’t need to be a beekeeper! Please review the job description PDF below.

Storytelling is a powerful thing: it connects us across generations and cultures, bringing us together through our shared humanity.

We do a lot of storytelling in person, as we work alongside each other in the gardens and apiaries, sharing memories, skills and moments; when we visit other communities or take part in festivals, conferences or events. We also use social media, our instagram especially, to take our stories further.

Last month a few of our photos were featured in a gallery exhibit as part of Capture Fest, along with community partners The Binner’s Project, Megaphone Magazine and FoodStash Foundation.

A few images of those images are shared here, and a wonderful interview from Melissa Shaw on Inside Media at Coop Radio, can be found here.

We love hosting workshops in the apiary for teams. Often, holding a frame covered with hundreds of bees elicits feelings of fear, bravery and excitement. Eventually the fear transforms into curiosity and time slows down – this is what beekeepers now call “Bee Time” (with thanks to Mark Winston’s wonderful book of the same name, which explores this idea so beautifully). This is one of the reasons why beekeeping is such a rewarding experience, especially for new beekeepers. Communication, trust, and patience around the hive are critical and each time we open the hive is an opportunity to practice these skills. We recently welcomed the tech company Routific into our apiary and they shared the story of how bees have inspired them – check out the media coverage below:

Our friend and mentor, author of Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive, and Professor at SFU Centre for Dialogue, Mark Winston, was commissioned by Vancity Credit Union to write a research paper on the honey bee industry in BC.

The report was released at the end of July and it shows that BC is bucking the trends that we so often hear in the media, of globally declining bee health and populations. The report contains good news for bees in our province, and highlights the opportunities for us to support bees, both wild and managed, by focusing on growing and diversifying our local beekeeping resources, strengthening our economy and our ecosystem as we go.

We had the opportunity to write a set of guest blogs with Vancity for their Good Money Blog: one on Saving the Bees, another on Urban Beekeping, and you can read Mark’s report here. (The first page has a really great list of highlights, the guts of the information, and then you can read on for more detail and even a little bit of a story about us on page 4!)

We had a really fun time sharing the story of what we do and why we do it with Sheryl MacKay from CBC’s North by NorthWest. And we love all the feedback we are getting from radio listeners, province wide!

There’s a little write up from CBC here and you can listen to the show in podcast format here (we are at about the 37 min mark!)

It’s exciting to see our bees and our programming getting shared through media and we hope that the buzz will continue to generate interest and support!

Today we are visiting apiaries in the rain to check in with the communities that grow around the bees, scatter some pollinator friendly seeds and continue to foster the supportive culture of the hive.

Blooming in the garden this week (featured image): last year’s kale – we’re letting it bloom as early forage for the pollinators out there, and some colour in the garden, while the new kale gets growing!

We did a brief interview on the Bill Good Show a month or so ago, talking’ bees up high on the 2oth floor of the 700 W Georgia building overlooking the city and looking out to the pacific; what a treat! Through that we met Jessica Gares, Senior Producer at CKNW.

Jessica asked if she could come visit the hives with us and meet our community, she was bubbling with excitement in the CKNW offices and the next week she was very much the same out in the field in the Downtown Eastside with us.

We got the chance to put her mic inside some of our hives and listen to the bees and the different tones of their buzzing, and she put together this short audio documentary on Hives for Humanity.

Vendors buy the magazines from the Megaphone offices for 75cents and sell them for $2 – the programming facilitates creative expression through writing, poetry, art and photography and is a source of dignity for many, providing meaningful work.

Fostering a sense of self worth and developing pride in a community that is too often demonized, is a core mandate of the program; one we fully believe in and work to share.